Pain, loneliness, humiliation, and grief underlie these atomized, broken lives.
The nine interconnected stories in this novella, set in a small Japanese town, center on a suicide.
In a seaside town, a nameless inspector investigates a dead body, presumably a suicide. The jaded, grumpy inspector wants to solve the mystery, mostly so he can best his colleague. But, as le Grange (Wolsely, 2014) shows in this novella, human beings hold on hard to their secrets, lies, hopes, and fantasies. Each chapter explores a different character’s point of view that illuminates for the reader, if not for the inspector, how the suicide came about, beginning with Tamika’s story. She’s a high school girl who is being prostituted by her mother; the family needs money because Tamika’s father is dying of cancer and her brother just started college. Tamika’s mother tries to be “the driving force behind [her son’s] success” and feels justified in prostituting her daughter: “It had to be done. Women had to make sacrifices sometimes in their lives.” The old woman who saw the suicide’s body hit the ground is preoccupied with hating her daughter-in-law. Kenji is a university student in love with the handsome but unreliable Jotaro. Tamika’s father is as tormented by regrets as he is by the cancer eating him alive. Tamika’s client is a frustrated salaryman. Tamika’s brother feels burdened by familial responsibilities and humiliated by social failures. For all these characters, whatever their dreams may have been, le Grange shows that their realities are powerless and sordid. Tamika’s client, for example, is on his first visit to a prostitute, encouraged by a colleague’s tales of exciting, obedient girls. But everything about the encounter—the rules, the cost, the girl’s quietness, his feeling like an intruder—disquiets him: “This was so not how he had imagined this.” Even tender moments, as when Tamika gently washes her father’s face, seem only to stoke despair and regret. Le Grange handles these moments with subtlety, tracing out the connections his characters cannot see—which adds to the stories’ brutal ironies.
Pain, loneliness, humiliation, and grief underlie these atomized, broken lives.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5007-9745-4
Page Count: 106
Publisher: PinkGorrilla Multimedia Publishers
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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